According to statistics, 80% of the worlds cryptocurrency mining uses chips produced by Bitmain; this company that occupies an absolute dominant position in the field of mining machine production is therefore known as the Mine Bully. The founder of Bitmain, Wu Jihan, is also considered by the outside world as controlling 30% of the computing power in the Bitcoin world and the most powerful person in Chinas currency circle.
On the evening of June 15th, Wang Feng, the founder of Mars Finance and the founder of Linekong Interactive Group, had a conversation with Jihan Wu. This dialogue was full of work. Regarding the issues such as Bitmain has a 51% attack on Bitcoins computing power and Bitmains plan in the AI field, Wu Jihan gave a response. For details, see Odaily Wang Feng Ten Questions Dialogue with Wu Jihan: For the first time publicly responding to the question of 51% computing power attack, revealing Bitmains AI layoutOne article. And what were saying is that in this conversation,Wu Jihan responded to the turmoil at the New York Consensus Conference; at the same time, he also told an unknown story about Bitcoin forks.
During the conversation, Wang Feng asked: Bitcoin network expansion has become an urgent problem to be solved. In February 2016, you and a group of representatives of Bitcoin Core, mainly from the United States, reached a settlement agreement in Hong Kong, advocating the realization of segregated witness. , to double the block size. But then it was shelved. In May 2017, DCG (Note: Digital Currency Group, Digital Currency Group, is an investment company focusing on Bitcoin and blockchain technology, was established in October 2015) Founder Barry Silbert convened 58 company representatives from 22 countries to hold a meeting in New York, and reached a consensus on the Segwit2X Bitcoin expansion plan, expanding the block size from 1M to about 2M, which not only solves the problem of expansion problem, and avoid the emergence of forks.
But on July 17, 2017, ViaBTC, invested by Bitmain, announced that Bitcoin would name the newly generated currency Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which is said to have made those who signed the New York consensus very angry. In May of this year, BCH completed a second upgrade, expanded to 32M through a hard fork, supported 100+TPS, and greatly increased its carrying capacity and transaction speed. Where were the points of disagreement around the Bitcoin expansion controversy?
In response, Wu Jihan responded: Speaking of the New York Agreement (New York Agreement), this staged compromise was finally abandoned by both large-block advocates and small-block advocates who were expanded.
In April 2017, Bitcoin scaling faced an impasse as Core as a whole refused to endorse the commitments of the Hong Kong Consensus signatories. Digital Currency Group (DCG) founder Barry Silbert, who has invested heavily in Bitcoin, felt he had to stand up and push the industry to break the deadlock. Barry Silbert told me privately that although DCG has invested in many types of digital currencies, BTC occupies the most important position. He hopes that Bitcoin can expand smoothly. Barry is also the host of the Consensus conference held in New York in May every year. Throughout April, Barry worked extremely hard and started one-on-one contacts with major companies and developer representatives in the industry. After taking the role of mediator and putting in a lot of effort, Barry initially softened the positions of all parties. Blockstream (Blockstream is a company that aims to expand the function of the Bitcoin protocol layer, leading the research and development of the extension mechanism of the side chain to connect the Bitcoin blockchain and other altcoin blockchains), Adam Back promised that Barry would Traveled to New York in January for face-to-face consultations.
But before Adam left, he was severely stopped by another important partner in Blockstream. This is what Adam told Micree in Hong Kong. On the eve of the talks in New York, Adam temporarily announced his refusal to attend the meeting. At the same time, Blockstream sent Miao Yongquan, a lower-ranking member, to participate in the talks.
Due to the resistance of some important bitcoin ecological enterprises, Yongquan Wu was rejected by the conference host Barry. These entrepreneurs boycotting Mr. Yongquan threatened to refuse to attend the meeting if Mr. Yongquan attended the talks. Therefore, Wu Yongquan was not able to attend the meeting. Why do you boycott Miao Yongquan to attend the meeting? The main reason is that Wu Yongquan often conducts unlimited personal attacks on some community members on Twitter.
In particular, I did not join the ranks of the protesters. This process can show that Blockstream and the developers of the entire small block camp, on the one hand, are rejected by major companies in the industry; on the other hand, they also refuse to communicate. Quan (often appearing as a spoiler), is a good example.
I checked my calendar and the meeting is May 21, 2017 in New York. It was a Sunday and the morning sun was very bright. Barry organized a meeting for everyone in the open air on the roof of a hotel. Because of the strong sunlight, many attendees wore sunglasses. After the conference, I got a sunburn on the back of my bare neck. Barry invited key community representatives to the meeting.
The focus of the discussion at the meeting was whether SegWit activation should be bound to hard fork expansion, so that the two can be carried out at the same time. Barry intentionally represented Adam, who was not present, and spoke from Adams standpoint. I hope everyone can agree to activate SegWit first, put aside the matter of expansion, and reach a gentlemans agreement first, and talk about it in the future.
But most companies on the scene hope to be able to bind together. For example, Bitpay (BitPay has always been called PayPal on Bitcoin, it is a payment solution for merchants who receive Bitcoin, merchants receive Bitcoin from individual consumers, transfer the money into their own currency through BitPay, and pay 0.99% to BitPay as a handling fee),Blockchain.info(blockchain.info is a well-known onchain online wallet service provider, and also provides bitcoin blockchain data query services) and others pointed out that the current situation of bitcoin expansion is urgent. If they cannot be tied together to scale, their users will be forced to continue to pay high fees, and they will immediately start supporting alternative cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum. Some companies said that if they cannot reach an effective agreement that binds the conditions to each other today, they will leave the market immediately. They said that Core has refused to implement the Hong Kong consensus, why should we repeat the Hong Kong consensus in New York?
Bitfury (BitFury Group was founded in Russia in 2011, with management departments in San Francisco and Amsterdam, and data centers in Iceland and the Republic of Georgia. In the early days, it was an ASIC bitcoin mining machine chip research and development team, and now it is transformed into blockchain basic data services and transaction processing services) participated in the meeting. Bitfury has always supported the stance of small blocks, but to my surprise, Bitfurys representatives are exceptionally firm in their support for bundling together for expansion. The representative believed that if so many companies reach a consensus together, a small number of extreme small-block advocates of Core cant do much, and Bitcoin expansion will definitely succeed.
Barry persisted, hoping that the representatives present would accept Adams proposal, that is, to use SegWit first, and talk about other things later. At this time, representatives of three important companies threatened to leave immediately. Others, although not as strong in their stance, echoed it. In the end, the representatives present - to emphasize - the representatives present formed a consensus and were ready to implement the SegWit+2M binding expansion plan, which was later widely known as SegWit2X.
At the same time, Wu Jihan also shared a technical detail: Bitcoin has multiple voting points when it votes on computing power. SegWits voting is activated by voting at point 1. The SegWit2X scheme launched by the New York Consensus, In order to make it clear that the community is voting on SegWit2X and distinguishing it from SegWit itself, the meeting agreed to prepare to vote at position 4.
Why choose site 4 instead of site 2 and site 3? I am afraid that there will be some unannounced community plan, and plan to adopt site 2 and site 3. To be conservative, choose point 4, so as to avoid collision. The meeting ended in one morning. After the meeting was over, Barry drafted the content and confirmed it to the representatives.
Then, Barry began to collect more extensive signature support. Barry hopes to make the announcement at the upcoming Consensus conference. Naturally, before the agreement was announced to the public, some major developers and entrepreneurs in the community knew the content of the agreement.
On Monday following Sunday, the agreement was still only gathering supportive signatures among businesses. On Monday night, something unexpected happened. A developer of Bitcoin Core, named James, proposed a very paradoxical proposal before the agreement was announced, which was numbered BIP91. The BIP91 also decided to adopt site 4 for voting.
Since the agreement and the protocol of the New York Consensus have not been published, it seems that there is nothing wrong with this accidental crash! Of course, its just that there seems to be no problem.
Both SegWit2X and BIP91 employ site 4 for voting. Let’s not worry about what BIP91 is. If both BIP91 and SegWit2X use point 4 to vote, when the voting actually happens, it will be unclear which one the voter voted for. Going a step further, a voter can also hold an ambiguous position and interpret his voting behavior arbitrarily.
What is the content of BIP91? In fact, it is relatively simple. It is to vote at position 4 first, and when 80% of the votes are agreed, it will be mandatory to vote at position 1, and then SegWit will be passed. . As for expanding blocks? It doesnt exist at all.
The first half of BIP91, which is to activate SegWit, is exactly the same as SegWit2X. The only difference is whether to expand the block size after SegWit is activated. BIP91 does not have block expansion content, but SegWit2X includes it.
At that time, two domestic mining pools used this to claim that they first supported the New York Consensus, and later claimed that they actually voted for BIP91. Since BIP91 deliberately rushed to occupy position 4, it is almost clear that after SegWit is passed, they will immediately withdraw their support for the New York Consensus. The prospect of the New York Consensus being aborted was all but certain.
At the same time, some extreme Bitcoin Core activists began to strongly advocate the so-called UASF. This UASF is not officially supported by Core. For a while, the community fast camp released two clients at the same time: UASF client and Core client.
UASF did not get the support of the so-called Core, but almost the entire Blockstream camp was mobilized to incite support for UASF on social media.
These supporters, as senior developers, do not understand that UASF is a very dangerous scheme. During UASF, the entire Bitcoin network will fork into two coins, one is UASF coins and the other is normal Bitcoin. But if the price of UASF becomes higher in the subsequent transaction process, then the computing power will be attracted to the UASF chain, and then the UASF chain will become longer, covering the original Bitcoin chain. UASF is actually a 51% attack planned by market means.
Since the vast majority of exchanges and users are unaware of the dangers of UASF, they are unprepared. If UASF occurs, there will be huge controversy and confusion in many transaction histories. The entire Bitcoin chain has a very long and deep rollback, and many exchanges and many users will lose money
Therefore, at this time, in order to ensure that transactions on at least one chain are not rolled back, measures must be taken. So we, together with many experts in the Daqukuai community, took advantage of another proposal called BUIP055, and discussed a solution named UAHF (User Activated Hard Fork).
The UAHF scheme was defensive at the beginning, to ensure that if UASF is activated, there is still a backup of the entire Bitcoin transaction history, which will not be completely erased.
After the UAHF plan was realized, soon some community members appeared in the fast community of the Greater District, planning to turn the defensive plan of UAHF into an aggressive plan. Our research has found that as long as UAHF is implemented persistently and specific technical means are added, a brand new blockchain with large blocks will be born and exist independently of Bitcoin.
Therefore, after foreseeing the prospect that the New York Consensus would inevitably be betrayed by dishonest small blockists, BCH driven by UAHF technology was born. After the birth of BCH, no one paid attention to it for a long time, and the entire large block community actively promoted the realization of the New York consensus.
Roger Ver said that he will firmly support the New York Consensus, but if the New York Consensus cannot be realized, he and the entireBitcoin.comwill immediately support BCH, and some signatories of the New York Consensus are indeed angry. For example, the operator of a fast-minded mining pool in a domestic community said, don’t we clearly support the New York consensus? Why does BCH still have to be independent. He forgot that he said in private that he only supported BIP91, not the New York Consensus. He supports New York Consensus in order to activate SegWit, and will not implement the part of block expansion. They were outraged that their attempt to permanently lock the Bitcoin blockchain at 1MB had failed.
